74 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
hog, which seemed to Alice an excellent opportunity for
croqueting one of them with the other: the only difficulty
was, that her flamingo was gone across to the other side of
the garden, where Alice could see it trying in a helpless sort
of way to fly up into a tree.
By the time she had caught the flamingo and brought it
back, the fight was over, and both the hedgehogs were out of
sight: ‘but it doesn’t matter much,’ thought Alice, ‘as all the
arches are gone from this side of the ground.’ So she tucked
it away under her arm, that it might not escape again, and
went back for a little more conversation with her friend.
When she got back to the Cheshire Cat, she was sur-
prised to find quite a large crowd collected round it: there
was a dispute going on between the executioner, the King,
and the Queen, who were all talking at once, while all the
rest were quite silent, and looked very uncomfortable.
The moment Alice appeared, she was appealed to by all
three to settle the question, and they repeated their argu-
ments to her, though, as they all spoke at once, she found it
very hard indeed to make out exactly what they said.
The executioner’s argument was, that you couldn’t cut off
a head unless there was a body to cut it off from: that he had
never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn’t going to
begin at his time of life.
The King’s argument was, that anything that had a head
could be beheaded, and that you weren’t to talk nonsense.
The Queen’s argument was, that if something wasn’t
done about it in less than no time she’d have everybody ex-
ecuted, all round. (It was this last remark that had made the